True the Vote, a Houston-based advocacy group, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday, demanding damages amounting to $85,000 after claiming that it was wrongfully targeted as a conservative group with Tea Party ties.

True the Vote, which claims to defend voter integrity, first applied for tax exempt status from the IRS on July 15, 2010. The organization was thereafter subjected to 17 investigations and queries from numerous federal agencies — including the FBI, Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Commission on Environmental Quality — as part practices described as “unnecessary and burdensome” in its official complaint filed on Tuesday. True the Vote’s founder and president Catherine Engelbrecht said the organization’s three-year internal battle with the IRS for tax-exempt status ends now.

“After answering hundreds of questions and producing thousands of documents, we’re done waiting,” Engelbrecht said in a Tuesday release. “Federal law empowers groups like True the Vote to force a decision in court – which is precisely what we aim to do.”

The lawsuit requests tax-exempt status for True the Vote as well as monetary damages.

In the complaint, True the Vote accused the IRS of deliberately delaying the organization’s application for tax exempt status, requiring excessive paperwork on the organization’s activities and possibly releasing the information it compiled in an unlawful manner. Public interest law firm ActRight Legal Foundation will represent Truth the Vote.

The IRS’s prolonged review of True the Vote’s application may have been encouraged by Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder in 2010 describing 15 alleged instances of voter intimidation and calling for his disposal of Department of Justice electoral monitors to prevent voter fraud. Engelbrecht said in an interview with the Houston Chronicle that Jackson Lee’s letter “never substantiated any claims” of voter intimidation or fraud, adding that True the Vote contacted Texas’s Harris County officials and did not find complaints or causes for investigation regarding the 2010 election.

“We are not going to allow the IRS to claim, as it has been doing in the past week, that the targeting of conservative groups is over and ‘everything has been fixed,’” said Cleta Mitchell, counsel to True the Vote and ActRight Legal Foundation, in the release. “It is not yet fixed and this litigation is a vital step both to resolve True the Vote’s status and to learn exactly what happened inside the IRS.”

During recent public hearings, the IRS has conceded that it unjustly targeted specific conservative groups during the application process for tax-exempt status for non-profits.

True the Vote is not the first Tea Party-affiliated organization to retaliate against the IRS. Northern California-based NorCal Tea Party Patriots filed a suit Monday enumerating violations of the group’s right to privacy and freedom of speech, as well as seeking damages from the IRS.